To me it is not a new idea, but it is a good idea, the one that says that the rich splash out now for what they think of as luxuries, but that some of these luxuries are actually emerging necessities, which will in due course be available to all at a fraction of the first prices paid by the rich. Sandra Tsing Loh is reviewing a couple of books for The Atlantic on line on these kinds of themes:
To consider “luxury” always a bad thing, Twitchell argues, is simply to ignore history.
“Almost without fail, one generation’s indulgence becomes the next generation’s necessity. Think buttons, window glass, rugs, fermented juice, the color purple, door handles, lace, enamel, candles, pillows, mirrors, combs, umbrellas.”
Well said, Twitchell. Why, yesterday I even bought a comb myself. For 40p. It was a rather ugly brown colour. I would have preferred purple.
Nail clippers and shorts and socks were once a luxury, and don’t forget the least frivolous “indulgence” of all: indoor plumbing. In a way, the rich provide society with a valuable service, because they pay the “high first costs” of emerging technology. “Sure, the ‘upfronters’ get HDTV, digital cameras, laser eye surgery, Palm Pilots … They also get first crack at Edsels, the Betamax, eight-track stereo, and Corfam shoes.”
I’m not sure about Palm Pilots. Aren’t they becoming rather passé, unless you think of them as part of the ongoing attempt to perfect the portable phone? And what are Corfam shoes?
Also: into which box will history put blogging? Is blogging window glass or Betamax, nail clippers or … Corfam shoes?
Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily for the link. For me Arts & Letters Daily used to be a luxury, but it has become a necessity.
Wealthy people spending their funds on luxury items has that irritating side effect of creating employment.
“Corfam” is/was an artificial leather that was supposed to be better than the real thing. I owned one pair of Corfam shoes. They made my feet sweat so much it was like wading.
And, of course, the Edsel was the first Ford model named after a member of the family, which bombed accordingly.
OT – please excuse me temporarily hijacking this thread – there’s an interesting debate on libertarianism going on here, from a mainly left perspective, I thought some of you might care to respond…
back to normal service.
It is a particular irony that one of the best examples of the process is the mobile phone. In the ‘loadsamoney’ 1980s it was seen as a yuppie toy and a symbol of the misallocation of resources to produce status symbols for the rich characteristic of capitalist economies. In the subsequent 15 years, the high prices paid by the early adopters, who may well have been motivated as much by status display as by utility, have funded the investment in quality improvement which make the devices a boon for the hard pressed single mother on average or lower earnings arranging her childcare.
The ugly legacy of the 1980s rhetoric was an era of trivialisation of mobile phone theft as a corrective to such market failures.
The phone’s one of the best recent ones, VCR’s, dishwashers and a bunch of other now common stuff also apply.
OTOH, there are limits to how this happens and format it takes. Plus it might create employment but not necessarily where you think it will.
Hahaha.
I haven’t heard about Corfam shoes in decades! LOL. These shoes, as mentioned before, were/are made of an artificial leather that was coated with a highly polished plastic (?) coating. These shoes were largely used in the military as an alternative to spitshining shoes, which can be tedious. The only problem with the Corfam shoes, as mentioned previously, is that they didn’t breathe worth a damn and the soles kinda sucked so your feet hurt.
An alternative to Corfam was to light your polish and then apply the polish while it was still a liquid. If you apply a light coating of liquid polish to a shoe and then careful buff it with a cloth you can, after a few coats, produce a very nice shine. The only problem is that this polish is subject to cracking and breaking. Nothing like marching around on a parade ground only to find out, during inspection, that your shoes/boots look like hell because the polish is cracked and broken. :/
The best way is to spitshine, and yes it really does require spit. You can use water but it lacks a certain quality that seems to be in spit. Perhaps it’s an enzyme or something. Whatever it is a spitshine is attractive and durable. It also takes a godawful amount of time to create and maintain. Nothing like spending an hour or so every single day spitshining all of your shoes and boots.
sigh. The action, the adventure and the memories of service in the US Marines. It was fun but, considering what I did most often, it felt like I was a highly trained, heavily armed and homocidal janitor. I can still remember those days when we would strip the **no polish finish** from the tiles in our HQ building so we would have the pleasure of greenpadding and polishing those damn tiles three times a day. That we did it sometimes in full combat gear with slung rifles just added to the experience.
A Janitor from Hell or a US Marine. hehehe.
Whilst I agree with the idea here I found an interesting exception back in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Satelite TV was indeed originally a toy of the rich but when it took off big time it was a necessity for those living on council estates. The middle classes didn’t get them until several years later. Likewise wide screen TV or any large screen TVs will be seen in the same high rise council estates and only later in more middle class homes who quite often go for years on a tiny set tucked away in a corner.
Anyone noticed how socialists complain that capitalism doesn’t provide luxuries for the masses, but then, when socialism provides them even less, they decry such luxuries as symbols of “bourgeois decadence” and “consumerism”?
Eventually, these luxuries become so commonplace that their possesion by the “poor” is accepted. When all boats are lifted, the rising tide goes unnoticed.
In the U.S. inflation is measured by variations in the Consumer Price Index, the monthly cost of purchasing a “standard market basket” of goods and services. The contents of the basket has changed over time, making its accuracy dubious. When $10 comes off the price of a microwave or cellular phone, that is a dip in inflation, but the fact that these items once cost thousands is ignored.
Which of course crowds out public ‘investment’ thereby creating less demand for civil ‘servants’. Mustn’t allow that to happen.
Sorry, forgot to include the text of the comment to which I was responding:
Wealthy people spending their funds on luxury items has that irritating side effect of creating employment.
You folks should really read Virginia Postrel’s excellent new book ‘the Substance of Style’ for a lengthy exposition on this subject. Good stuff.
I’m not yet 70 years old but can easily remember the “Icebox” in our house until after WWII. It held a 25 pound cake and needed to be replenished every few days. The refrigerator came in 1946, the washing machine in 1947, and the TV in 1948. All of these items were expensive and still relatively rare in many households until the ’50s. My grandmother had an old “two holer” until indoor plumbing was installed in 1952.
With respect to blogging, this one’s going the other way. It was created by the plebes, and now the rich have taken notice…
Indoor plumbing, greatest women’s liberation event in history. Look at poor people in the world: anybody w/o indoor plumbing. Washing machines are maybe second.
I remember going to the grandparents for the nice Color TV — to see the Wizard of OZ, in color.
Black Corfam shoes, at the US Naval Academy, saved me many hours of polish. (Maybe they gave me a foot fungus?) The spitpolish was better, but so much harder.
Did anyone notice that todays poor have all of yesterdays luxuries.
Socialist still insist that poverty is getting worse based on some meaningless inequality figures. Can you imagine what the victims of statism in Africa would give to get a poverty that includes mobile phones and satellite TV!!
Let’s not forget the airbags, another former luxury.
Good evening people,
I found you by accident while looking for something else. I was issued with a pair of corfam shoes in 1960somethimg while working on a V-Bomber airfield.
Besides giving you sweaty feet the flexing of the rigid uppers crushed my toes. I could not walk a mile in them. As this was the height or depths perhaps of the cold war has any one thought they could have been a KGB plot?
ED
Wot’s a URL?